Fufu is a staple in the West African diet, and this week, I got to try it with several varieties of soup and meat. My favorite combination was with groundnut soup, goat meat and a boiled egg.
I tried fufu! Fufu is a food that’s common in Ghana as well as some of the surrounding countries, including Burkina Faso and Togo. There are two parts to a bowl of fufu: there’s the fufu dough itself, and there’s a soup that it sits in. When you’re ordering, you pick which soup you would like to eat and whether you want meat in it, but the fufu dough is the same no matter what.
At first, I didn’t know what to think! The texture of the dough takes some getting used to; if you’ve ever tried raw biscuit dough, then you can probably imagine the feel of fufu in your mouth. It’s thick and sticky, but there’s a catch—you’re not supposed to chew it! You pull off small pieces of the dough with your right hand, dip them into the soup that the dough is sitting in, and swallow the pieces whole. Once I got the hang of eating it, I really liked fufu, especially with groundnut soup! Groundnut is the Ghanaian word for peanut, so groundnut soup is a spicy soup made from peanut butter.
